Intuit
Principal Product Designer
Aug 2023–Aug 2026AI-powered TurboTax mobile experiences that drove $35M+ revenue and 190K+ incremental units.
San Diego, CA
About Misha
From Siberia to California.
A change of climate. The same curiosity.
I’m Misha Belstar. Misha is a Russian nickname and an affectionate name for a bear, which explains the bear you’ll meet here. I grew up in Siberia, moved to New York to join Warner Bros., and eventually traded winter for San Diego with my husband.
Watching the first iPhone introduced made me curious about how software could feel. That question has stayed with me through streaming at Warner Bros., TV and mobile at MasterClass, and AI and native mobile experiences at TurboTax. I still want to pick things up and see how they work.
16+ years of experience
MasterClass
Staff Product Designer
Jun 2020–Aug 2023Consumer and enterprise experiences across OTT, iOS, and web; 15%+ engagement lift.
Fevo
Lead Product Designer
Jun 2018–Jun 2020B2B commerce design across 10+ products and 200+ sports and entertainment brands.
Warner Bros.
Product Designer
Aug 2015–Jul 2018Streaming UX across iOS, Android, web, Roku, and tvOS; 2× mobile revenue and +50% active users.
Apps I helped design received App Store Editors’ Choice recognition
>1 Billion
cumulative downloads across products I contributed to in 175 countries
Mentored 200+ designers around the world
Monthly users1M+
TurboTax reached #1 App across all App Store categories during peak season
Contributed to Webby-recognized projects
How I think about products
A remote is not a touchscreen.
I want a product to feel at home on the device in front of me. At MasterClass, designing for TV meant working with different remotes, focus behavior, and motion, while keeping discovery familiar. Consistency matters, but so does what your thumb can actually do.
See MasterClass on TVPrototype the question.
When an idea is hard to explain, I make enough of it to find out where it breaks. At TurboTax, I used working AI prototypes to make possible product directions tangible. On MasterClass Sessions, prototype testing was part of questioning our assumptions before committing to the experience.
Explore MasterClass SessionsLeave room for judgment.
I like systems that settle the repeatable parts and leave us time to think about the rest. On Sessions, shared flows, components, and tokens supported the experience across three platforms. To me, a good system should make the next product decision easier without deciding everything in advance.
See the Sessions system
Cross-platform experience
My career has focused on cross-platform streaming products for Warner Bros., DC, and MasterClass, with work shipped across Roku, Xfinity, Prime Video, mobile, web, and connected TV platforms worldwide.
I design, build, and ship.
Through BirdsCorp, I ship products of my own. GasPulse, the native iOS app I designed and built, keeps me close to what happens after the mockup: real data, awkward edge cases, and interactions that only make sense once they’re in your hand.
Code is increasingly part of how I design. I enjoy figuring out why something feels off, whether it’s the flow, a transition, or what happens when there’s nothing to show yet. Shipping gives those details somewhere real to live.
Let’s make an idea tangible.
I’m happiest when the direction is still taking shape and I can work closely with product and engineering to make it tangible. I’ll question an assumption, build something we can react to, and move between the whole experience and the tiny interaction that isn’t quite right.
That’s also what draws me to AI: deciding when it should help, when it should ask, and how people stay in control. Those are product questions I want to work through with people who care about the details.
Say hello.
If you have a product question you keep coming back to, I’d love to hear it. We don’t need a polished brief to start a good conversation.
Let’s talk →